The present invention relates to a work flow system control technique, and particularly to a technique which can be applied effectively to a work flow system control in which work is moved electronically between small-scale groups or between large-scale sections.
In the industrial field such as, for example, an examination system in insurance/financial business, an order-receiving/shipping system, a slip examination system and a group-work planning system in manufacturing business, there is work form in which a large number of workers join for execution of data inputting, editing and confirming, management, and so on. Recently, there has been already used a so-called work flow system in which such work form is carried out through a computer network to thereby attain reduction and deletion of documents etc., and, accordingly, attain shortening of the time required for completion of the work and reduction of the number of work steps.
In such a type work flow system as described above, it is conventionally general that data are directly circulated and processed to respective workers without any division. Accordingly, when one worker is updating data, other workers cannot update the data. This is because there is a possibility of occurrence of contradiction in data after updated when, for example, two workers perform processing on one and the same portion of the data in the manners different from each other. It is therefore difficult to improve work efficiency on the whole of the work flow.
Further, because the contents of the data are impartially circulated and disclosed to a large number of workers, it is impossible to carry out operations such as an operation of preliminarily limiting the range of disclosure of the data contents or the like on the basis of information concerning priorities of the workers in an organization, or the like. Accordingly, there is inconvenience in management of the security of data.
On the other hand, a technique disclosed in, for example, JP-A-6-131395 is known with respect to division and connection of data in an information processing system. In the conventional technique, there is, however, carried out an operation of comparing data between a file and another file to be connected on the basis of parameter names in the record attribute in the files so that only the record in which data are coincident with each other is determined as a subject of file connection. Accordingly, such a technical problem concerning the connection and separation of data flowing in the aforementioned work flow system has been not recognized though file connection/separation can be generated in a short time.